‘So far, there has also not been a word from the Donald’ … Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2016.
Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty

The Making of Donald Trump grew out of my frustration at the utter failure of my peers in US journalism to tell voters about his profitable, lifelong embrace of mobsters, violent felons, Russian oligarchs and the man who supplied his helicopters (Joseph Weichselbaum, a drug trafficker to whom Trump remained loyal despite his indictment).

Then Melville House came to me in late May 2016. This book, my sixth, was my attempt to get journalists to report the copious hard facts. They’d failed to examine the abundant official record on Trump for three main reasons: one, Trump’s outlandish style made him cheap and easy news; two, digging through old records and understanding them takes time and skill; and three, Trump threatened to sue everyone, including me, who mentioned his lifelong criminal ties. At the end of my book, I provided 44 pages of source notes and my personal email address so any doubting readers could get in touch. No one has shown any error.

Trump’s election campaign was ironic: he ran as the champion of working people when he has an awful approach to economics. I’ve chronicled it for decades, including a trilogy of books that focus on taking from the many to enrich the few: Perfectly Legal (taxes), Free Lunch (subsidies for Trump and other rich people), and The Fine Print (monopolies).

In the US, I’m well known for my investigative reporting. In 1968, at age 19, I became a front-page staff reporter for the San Jose Mercury. Ever since, I have been pursued by papers for exposés. I won a Pulitzer prize in 2001 for my stories exposing tax dodges and have been called the “de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States”. Because of my reporting, two presidents changed their tax policies, and Congress and state legislatures enacted many laws in response. Because of one story, Jack Welch gave up his lavish General Electric retirement perks and because of another, a broadcast chain was forced off the air after I proved its owner was manipulating news reports for his personal gain.

I first met Trump in 1988: I was working for The Philadelphia Inquirer, investigating New Jersey’s claim that regulation kept organised crime and vice out of Atlantic City casinos. I thought he was a modern PT Barnum, the 19th-century American seller of hoaxes like the FeeJee Mermaid. Trump would later become a major figure in my 1992 book Temples of Chance, which looked at how business moguls took over the casino business from the mafia. As part of that, I exposed how New Jersey regulators had created the appearance of regulation by going after cocktail waitresses and blackjack dealers, while turning a blind eye to serious misconduct serious misconduct by the casino owners. Later on, director Tim Burton hired me to outline a movie adaptation of Temples of Chance – but Trump killed it with litigation threats. (I would still love to see it on the silver screen, given Burton’s incisive eye for the absurd.)

Competitors, casino regulators and Trump’s own people told me he knew nothing of the casino business. Really? To test this, I interviewed him, making a false statement about craps. Trump incorporated my false statement into his answer – and did so again with three other questions containing false facts, which made me realise: he was just a conman.

When I broke the story in 1990, Trump denounced me personally to other journalists and complained to my editors. Weeks later, official documents showed he was worth $295m (£237m) less than zero. As I wrote then in the Philadelphia Inquirer: you, reader, are probably worth more than Donald Trump.

Soon after Trump declared his candidacy, I started writing about his deep entanglements with criminals. From my home near Lake Ontario, I shared some of my tens of thousands of pages of Trump documents with other journalists, and was saddened when their cautious stories buried key facts and required exceptional reading comprehension to grasp what was between the lines.

No publisher would contract for a book, assuming Trump would soon disappear. Then Melville House Press, in Brooklyn and London, offered a tiny advance with a short deadline. I jumped at the opportunity.

I spent June writing until the words blurred. I would nap sporadically between writing bouts, an unhealthy practice for anyone past retirement age. Only because I had extensive and well organised files, loving support from my wife and one of my eight grown children to help with research did I finish on the day of my deadline, 5 July 2016. The hardback was in my hands on 19 July and in bookstores across the US two weeks later. Melville House, you are miraculous.

I’ve been on BBC, ITV and broadcast news all over the world, from Australia to Brazil, Japan to Germany. However, there has been no mention of what is in my book on the four American broadcast news networks. Such is the state of cowed journalism in what was once the land of the free and home of the brave. So far, there has also not been a word from the Donald.

As for the Trump presidency: be worried, be very worried. Trump is ignorant, ruthless, power-mad, loves money and has an insatiable need for public adoration. Let’s hope we all get out of this without Trump fulfilling his statements about starting wars and using nuclear weapons – especially his talk of using nukes in Europe.

Extract

This book is my effort to make sure people around the world know a fuller story about Trump than the one he has polished and promoted with exceptional skill and determination. Trump, who presents himself as a modern Midas even when much of what he touches turns to dross, has studied the conventions of journalists and displays more genius at exploiting them to his advantage than anyone else I have ever known.

Journalists focus on the five Ws: who, what, where, when, why. That is fine for most news but inadequate for understanding Trump, whose campaign and personality fall outside the norm of politics coverage. Trump ran around those five Ws with a message designed to resonate emotionally with those who want a stern father figure as leader, someone who takes care of his own even if it is at the expense of everyone else.

More about the book

“Johnston has done voters a service with this unblinking portrait. He makes a compelling case that Trump has the attributes of both ‘dictator’ and ‘deceiver’ and would be a disaster in the Oval Office.

“Yet, ultimately this is a dispiriting read. If Johnston’s rendering of Trump is at all accurate, it is not just the New York businessman who deserves rebuke. So too does an entire American political system that has put him within reach of the White House despite his manifest flaws. As Johnston notes: ‘Trump’s success with voters tells an important story about the deep trouble America is in.’” – Financial Times